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Hildegard Westerkamp (Canada)

Hildegard Westerkamp was born in Osnabrück, Germany in 1946 emigrated in 1968 and gave birth to her daughter in 1977. After completing her music studies her ears were drawn to the acoustic environment as another cultural context or place for intense listening. As a composer, educator, and radio artist her work centres around environmental sound and acoustic ecology. Her compositions deal with aspects of the acoustic environment: with urban, rural or wilderness soundscapes, with the voices of children, men and women, with noise or silence, music and media sounds, or with the sounds of different cultures. She is a founding member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE).

PRESS
I was familiar with Hildegard Westerkamp's lovely Talking Rain....
Sounds that had before been arrayed in a stereo space were now moving
about in planes of space, things had a real volume, and the recording
of trucks on a rainy highway, about halfway through the piece, were positively
awesome. In this piece, I saw that we had finally reached that state Varese
was looking for where volumes and planes of sound could move through space.
Warren Burt, Leonardo Music Journal Review of Immersion - melbourne
- 7 june - 14 june 1999

Westerkamps music balances
a poetics of sound with social commitments that include feminism and environmental
politics. Her compositions are critical enactments of acoustic space....All
invoke attentive listening. Donna Zapf, Beiträge zur Neuen Music,
Germany

Westerkamp creates new possibilities for listening. One can journey
with her sound to inner landscapes and find unexplored openings in our
sound souls. The experience of her music vibrates the potential for change.
Her compositions invite interaction - a chance to awaken to ones
own creativity. One can transform through listening as she has. In the
music and soundscapes of Westerkamp we feel memory and imagination as
we hear through to the future. Pauline Oliveros, Kingston, N.Y.,
USA (about CD Transformations)

There was more than just a hint of oracular mysticism in Westerkamps
art. There was a magic in those sounds. It came from our sense of mingled
delight and astonishment that such delicacy goes on under our very, very
sophisticated noses. Fascinating and absorbing. Stephen Pedersen, Chronicle-Herald,
Halifax

Westerkamps tape works - which draw on sounds from the environment
- are elegantly shaped, often witty, always eloquent. They register not
just as created soundworks but as a way of listening to the world - the
aural equivalent of a point-of-view. Susan Mertens, Vancouver Sun

This composition is as expansive as the
desert, intimate as the voice of a single cricket. Andra McCartney,
Musicworks, Toronto (about CricketVoice)

This is a composer who loves beautifully sculpted timbres, often focussing
on high frequency and carefully 'hand-tinted' spectra, or using low and
high pitched sounds in an almost metaphorical sense. Many of the sounds
have the clear, crisp hyper-reality of the acousmatic world, but Westerkamp
has different stories to tell. Katherine Norman, Spring 99 ARRAY issue
on ICMA website

École Polytechnique taps into ancient lamenting traditions,
with their cathartic and healing functions that historically served both
the individual and the community....I am shaken by its evocation of violence....and
impressed by the way Westerkamp avoids the traps of literalism or melodrama.
Tamara Bernstein, Herizons

An evocative score in any context, École Polytechnique
seemed to speak with special poignancy to the Montreallers who witnessed
its premiere. In a sense, it spoke for them. Wilhelm Littler, Toronto
Star

Hildegard Westerkamps work at its best brings us closer to the
notion that we are the sounds that we hear...the "just listening"
state...the dissolution of the "me listening to that " construct,
this is the essence of Talking Rain.. Mark Parlett for the Canadian
Electroacoustic Community, March 1998

Mere words are inadequate to describe what took place when the symphony
began....Waves of sound rolled back and forth across the harbour bringing
thousands of downtown office workers to their windows. The Canada geese
from Stanley Park were aroused and circled through the boats, honking
loudly as they joined in. Ken Drushka, Harbour and Shipping (about
the Harbour Symphony)

The sound was like that of a herd of happy elephants caught in a traffic
jam. Globe & Mail, Toronto (about the Harbour Symphony)